Meanwhile, there seem to be no immediate plans for heroes like Black Panther, whose movie has been in development limbo for 20 years. Same for Luke Cage. No one is talking movies for Monica Rambeau. Ditto Runaways. Or a proper Generation X movie. I could go on.

Notice that since Marvel found box office success with movies like Spiderman and Iron Man that concepts featuring anything other White Men at the center have been trash-canned? And not just at Marvel?

And yet everyone seems to forget that Blade showed movie studios that, if done well, superhero movies can make money.

At the most, we get side characters. Yeah it’s great that Idris Elba is Heimdal and that Marvel stuck by their decision to cast him despite the racist douchebags saying he couldn’t be black, but how much screen time did Heimdal get compared to Thor?

How much screen time is the Falcon going to get compared to Captain America or the Winter Soldier?

Is War Machine with Don Chiddle even going to be in the third Iron Man movie?

I think to be honest that Marvel’s movies have shamefully neglected black superheroes to this point and excuses for that wear rather thin after a while. And I honestly think War Machine is overdue for his own movie, as I happen to like the James Rhodes character more than Downey Stark.

A fictional African country which is the most technologically advanced in the world out of their own ingenuity? And they’re not giving to the rest of the world because we’re all jerks and would just misuse these technologies? Imagine that! You know I can’t. Now, let me go flesh out Asgard.

I never did either. Having never seen Buffy and having kept hearing about this guy praised for his “strong female characters”, I went into Firefly only to end up thinking “Where is the feminism? I’m told there is feminism.” And that isn’t it’s only problem either (Hint: Shepard Book; Chineseness but no Asians; lesbos hawt ghey ew)

Then what he did to Xavin in Runaways.

And Black Widow. I don’t buy the bullshit that she’s supposed to be empowering.

What gets me is that DC had a chance here to showcase a strong man of colour in their Green Lantern movie by casting someone as Jon Stewart, but instead went with Hal Jordan. They could have gone for those POC dollars and gotten dollars from white people too, but they went with some lame ass character who is being pushed by his biggest fanboy, Geoff Johns.

Who’s the more heroic and interesting character, I ask you?

A jackass, arrogant stunt/test pilot who’s fearless?

Or a former US Marine who knows about duty, honour and self sacrifice?

Hell, I heard stories of white parents whose kids were asking why Green Lantern was white in the movie because they grew up watching Jon Stewart on the Justice League cartoon.

I love the Marvel movies, I do, and more than likely I’m going to see them all at some point or another, but there’s still a lot about them that can be improved. Hell, they’ve cast Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin in the third Iron Man movie. So we have whitewashing on top of an ugly, Asian stereotype.

And then there’s Bane in the new Batman movie, who is a latino played by a white guy… another negative POC in a movie where we’re supposed to root for a rich white guy with anger problems who blows up people’s cars as a form of intimidation.

Like, DC could get Danny Trejo to voice Bane in the Young Justice cartoon and have him speak Spanish, but they can’t get a latino for the role? I know if they did, it would have been interesting to watch the movie and see Bane as the hero.

There’s an ironic note here in that Power Rangers was an adaptation of Japanese Tokusatsu of the Ultraman variety to American media. Which makes the decided absence of Asian actors or references to Japanese culture with actual Japanese people involved the more ironic.

This especially when Shinkenger, a series which has a premise based very specifically on Japanese culture, is adapated into Power Rangers Samurai and they decided to cast a white guy for Red. Even though I’m of the opinion that Shinkenger should remain unadapted, I would at least be accepting if they had cast someone of Japanese descent as Red. Am I seriously supposed to believe that some ugly white dude is the head of a samurai clan? Which is inexplicably in America for that matter!

The closest we have to that is in Shinkenger, where it turned out that the real Red is a woman and that the guy who has been fighting as Red is a kagemusha. Too bad she only appeared for the last five episodes.

It reamins to be seen whether PR Samurai would use the same plot point but I don’t care for that show.